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Friday, December 04, 2015

Dark Eldar Grotesques Aberration Painted! (Flesh Friday)

Well, this feels pretty good.

Though I may not have succeeded with as much of my November Modeling Vow as I did with October, but I still feel like I accomplished some good things in November, chief among them, for me, is having finished painting AND BASING the unit of Dark Eldar Grotesques that I finished modeling in October.

That last basing bit is key. Anyone who has known me for a while can attest to the fact that I'm far more interested in modeling and sculpting than I am in painting and basing. Though I said I finished a lot of things in October, NONE of them were based. I fixed that his month, forcing myself to get over how boring I find basing, and have now nearly finished basing all the models I painted in October.

The full idea and process behind my bases is something I'll go into in a separate, fuller article. For now, the general concept was that I wanted them to represent the floor of a Haemonculus' workshop: a slick, bloody mess, some of which looked like it might actually be alive.

For painting the Grotesques and Aberration, I took the colour scheme for The Hexed from the Haemonculus Covens book...

... and combined that with a version of the purple flesh that Doctor Faust suggests in his Talos Painting Tutorial...

...to come up with this.

I wasn't 100% pleased with resorting to drybrushing on the Grotesques, particularly since they have such vast tracts of bare skin. I had an airbrush, so I figured I should give that a go. Having seen a lot of people doing preshading with an airbrush on Instagram (and if you're on instagram, please look me up on there as I'd be happy to follow you!), I gave it a go:

...but having little to know idea what I was doing, and not being sure that I was using the right airbrush paint for the effect to have any...effect, I feel like it mostly acted as a reminder to "keep these areas dark. Here are the Grotesques after the initial purple coat:

And, having been pleased with how well the airbrush handled fabrics/robes on my initial Wracks test model above, I did my first experiment with masking and airbrushed the non-purple parts:

THAT I as extremely happy with, particularly on the Aberration / Stormfiend's tabbard (though here some of that beautiful work has been obstructed by gore :P).

Here's some WiP on the Aberration where you can still see the tabbard:

In the end, the scheme I fully pioneered on the Wrack model translated pretty well to the Grotesques:

However, I am most happy with the Aberration since I plowed so much greenstuff into him.

I quickly learned that stitches are WAAAAY more fun to sculpt than they are to paint. I did a first pass on them, was pretty impressed with myself, then showed them to the Norn Queen, and she told me they were basically crap and I could do better. So I had to.

How To Sculpt Miniatures

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About Modern Synthesist

This is the hobby blog of Mr Pink, with the occassional interruption by his brother, Nuffsed. We create conversions of Games Workshop models (mostly) for Tyranids, Dark Eldar, Tau and Blood Angels (again, mostly). Mr Pink also offers tutorials on how to sculpt miniatures.

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